La Dolce Vita

The past week it just seems like the road to Gilded Age Hell is ever broader and easier.

But Sunday morning was sunny and cool, the roads of North Portland were quiet, my hip was silent as my battered old Kona bicycle was spinning like a top, and the cheese danish at Madrona Hill Bakery was sweet as a lover's midnight kiss.

So the hell with my country's search for the miserable times we thought had gone for good after 1929. Sufficient unto tomorrow is the Evil thereof, and I am just going to leave you with the image of a deliciously languid Sunday.

Mal y pense

My bride was intrigued by the spectacle of Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey, so that is what we watched tonight.

And it was, indeed, intriguing, but not for the reasons it was advertised.

Most of it was a simple repetition of things we know, or should have known already.

The doping, well, I've said this before; I had no doubt that Armstrong, like most of his great competitors, used the methods they did - EPO, CERA, HGH, testosterone, stimulants, corticosteriods - because they had to, to win. The officials that should have been ahead of the cheaters were helpless, and so it was cheat, or lose.

It was obvious to me that Armstrong fully absorbed the ethic of the peleton of his day; that to win meant to cheat, and that anyone who couldn't or wouldn't cheat was not a hero but a fool.

From tonight's interview it's fairly obvious to me that Armstrong still feels that way. And he is still the carefully unsentimental predator he has always been.

He is remorseful, yes, but only because he was caught and in so doing has harmed people he actually cares about; his children, his mother, perhaps his wife and his ex-wife.

The rest of us, well, we're not really people who matter. We're there to be extras in The Lance Armstrong Story.

Most of us think this way, of course, but it takes a pretty enormous ego to be willing to parade that attitude in full view on national television.

And for the record, Oprah really was an awful inquisitor. She wasted an immense amount of time on things that were self-evident and let slide the real hard questions that might have forced the man she was supposed to be interviewing to reveal himself. He slid around any real acceptance of the wrong he did to those who had spoken the truth about him, notably Betsy Andreu and David Walsh.

Armstrong seems clearly using this as a ploy to win sympathy and as an attempt to gain some sort of toehold back into professional sport. He openly stated that he thought his punishment was excessive and that he was driven by a need to compete.

And that was a point that Oprah, as was her habit during the entire interview, failed to seize upon.

Because if Armstrong really needed to compete he needn't return to the Chicago Marathon or any other sanctioned event. He could train and run or ride in secret and alone, where only he would know how strong and fast he had become.

But for this man what he knows about himself is not important. His life is lived by what others know about him. It is not important to be the fastest, or the strongest. It is important to him that others see him as the fastest and strongest.

That has always been the only real question to me worth asking here: "Why now?"

"We've heard you say you're sorry. We've heard you claim that you feel that you have to tell the truth now for your children's sakes. But if that were the case, why didn't you tell the truth when you, of all men, could have told the truth and changed the very sport you claim you loved? Why should we believe any of your apologies now, when you had the chance to be a truly great man and you didn't; worse, instead of merely lying and cheating you savaged those who DID speak the truth about you?"

Sadly, this interview just made clear what we've known; that this man will never do anything for itself. He is simply not made to value such things.

Lois Bujold - I always seem to come back to her when I'm talking about Armstrong, for some reason - writes that the difference between honor and reputation is that reputation is what others know about you, while honor is what you know about yourself. That "(t)here is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying."

Which it may well be for a man or woman who prizes honor above reputation, the inner truth over the outward show.

But, if otherwise irritating, obscure, and incomplete, this interview did show me one thing clearly; Lance Armstrong was not that man.

And he still is not.

Gods and Heroes

The tale of Lance Armstrong has become almost tragic.

The only thing that saves it from true tragedy is that the tragic hero doesn't seem to be aware to his fatal flaw. He seems unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge that he has paid too grievous a price for his glory.

Lois Bujold said it best: "Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart." When Lance traded his honor - the very thing he trades on most, his reputation as a clean rider - for victories he gave away the gift. And he can never regain that gift; it is gone as though it had never been.

The fact that it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Armstrong, like nearly all the other top-flight cyclists in his era, relied on a combination of transfused blood and drugs like EPO and CERA to boost their endurance to impossible levels does not make the other facts of his lifestory - the cancer and the recovery - less true, or less moving.

Yes, there's a lie there. But there is truth, too. And to accept the truth you have to accept the lie; you cannot have the man without his failings, and it is for you and I to decide if those failings are too great for the man's achievements to have any meaning.

We want our heroes to be perfect. We want them to be pure, without stain, without sin. We want them to be bigger than we are, better, in short, we want them to be more than human.

But to be more than human is to be closer to a god than a hero. There are those among us who wanted Lance Armstrong to be more than a hero, more than a human, who wanted him to be perfect as a god.

And that will always end in heartbreak.

Clay

I've talked about this many times before, but now the evidence seems too overwhelming to refute:

Lance Armstrong was doping during some or all of his post-cancer Tour wins.

The thing is, I've never really questioned that great likelihood that the one-man icon machine was using something like the same methods the rest of the peleton was using. As I've also said before; professional cycling and The Tour in particular were drenched, saturated in doping in the Nineties and Oughts. All the patrons, the big powers of the peleton, were shown to have doped. The notion that Armstrong had some sort of godlike physique that enabled him to fly along with the blood-dopers and EPOids?

Ridiculous.

Obviously Armstrong will go to his grave without ever admitting that he was cheating. The person he wishes to be perceived by others (and, by inference, he perceives himself to be) is dominated by the conceit that he cannot be a cheat.

But now equally obvious is the conclusion that the man DID cheat.

And I should note that it says something very interesting about the man that he has invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in forcibly denying this, and attempting to force others to support him. Given what we now know, it is intriguing that he would have insisted on this course, rather than simple grim silence. Either he is the infuriated victim of the most grotesque conspiracy every concocted, or his arrogance truly has no limits.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. I wonder; what does Lance Armstrong know about himself. In the dark hours of the night, does he ever reflect on what he was and what he has become?

But, frankly, to me it no longer matters what the man did or does or if he ever admits what happened on the roads, in the cities and towns of France over seven years.

What we know is that athletes who need to win to make a living will cheat to win if there are no sure penalties for cheating. As surely as the sun rises or the rain falls. If you knew that your competitor was cheating and would not get caught, what virtue is there in being beaten hollow as an honest man?

So it would be nice if Armstrong would lie down and take his beating like a man. But he won't. So we will have to accept this as an indictment of the principle that any sport - any profession, any nation, anyone anywhere - can afford to be complacent and lazy about policing itself.

Professional cycling can no more expect its races to receive respect if it does not force its liars and cheats into the harsh light of punishment than a nation can expect to receive good government if its political "discourse" is dominated by ridiculous lies and half-truths and the public press forgoes exposure and ridicule of those lies in favor of facile presentations of fluff and nonsense.

There will always be those who choose to cling to the comforting lie rather than stare dry-eyed at the eviscerating truth. There will always be fools who will prefer to lie inert and be fooled than to force themselves to do the hard graft of determining the truth from the lie and finding out the consequences of each.

And there will always be the Armstrongs who rely on those fools. A fanbase, and a nation, of sheep will inevitably find that their heroes, and governments, are wolves.

La Lanterne Rouge

One thing that Portland does rather well is bicycling.

Don't mistake me; we're smack down in the middle of Northwest Redneck Gooberland, where trucknuts and mudflap girls roll throughout the outer Southeast and beyond Beaverton to the west, but in our downtown we have worked diligently to make riding the velocipede safer and more beguiling than most other parts of the U.S.

Back in the day I used to commute to my old job over the West Hills on my lead-pipe-construction Kona hybrid, grunting and sweating up one side and freewheeling down the other morning and night. Sharing Barnes Road with the cars sucked, but the ride through the Washington Park forest on the east side of the hills was a hell of a great way to imagine yourself breaking away from the peleton through the hills of the Vosges or up the wooded slopes of the Pyrenees.

My present office lies too far over the hills and far away from North Portland even assuming I wanted to risk the ride up and down Germantown Road. And my uneven legs have made cycling - exercising in general - a less regular event for me. So it was with a little trepidation that I entered the 17th edition of the Bridge Pedal, Portland's annual mass celebration of cycling, and headed downtown before dawn to try and ride over nine of our ten Willamette River bridges.

Well, I didn't make nine; between the St. John's Bridge and the long ride back downtown to cross the Fremont my right knee just crapped out. The fact that I had just ridden past the Fire Direction Center probably had something to do with my unwillingness to ride through the sore knee and achy hip. As did the realization that my fitness is completely gone.

In the day I was a beast of a climber. Not much on descents for fear of falling, but going uphill I was relentless. Sunday, however, the second small incline set my legs to burning with lactose buildup, and by the ride up the road to the big green suspension bridge to North Portland I was gassed. The feeling that your body has betrayed you is an ugly one, and bone loss or no, I have got to figure out how to get back in the saddle. I despise my weakness; I'd rather hurt than simply give up my strength.

So Team Me recorded a DNF on Sunday, I'm afraid, and is now looking for a new directeur sportif to get the boys back into the peleton, if nothing else, as the red light at the tail end of the train.

91 hours in France.

The 97th Tour de France is over.Alberto Contador has won his third Tour, bringing him into the corona of the Greats; the equal of Philippe Thys in the Teens, Louison Bobetin the Fifties, and Greg Lemond in the Eighties and early Ninties. The next step is a fourth and fifth victory; if the Spaniard can manage that he will be assured a place in cycling history alongside Hinault, Merckx, and Big Mig Indurain. His performance in the individual time trial on Saturday was strong enough to allay most of the questions observers like myself had about the athletically acceptable but sportingly questionable attack on the Port de Balès on the 19th of July that put him in yellow.

This edition of the Tour will, sadly, probably be remembered more for the Last Tour of Lance rather than Third of Alberto.The spectacle of Armstrong struggling to keep up, his jersey ripped from crashing, is a worthwhile reminder of the incredible luck needed to even finish, much less win, this most grueling of athletic events. In the seven times the man won this event he never had a really bad day; never took a serious injury, never really fell catastrophically at speed as he did in Stage 8 this year. The pain he endured was the pain of victory, not the agony of defeat.You could make the argument that for a man of 39 twenty-third place is not a defeat. I doubt that Armstrong feels that way; he is what he must be to have won this race seven times - a predator, a man with a tremendous ego and need to win. No, regardless of his age, today must be a bitter end to his cycling career.

And, for me at least, this year asks some real tough questions about the man who was either Lance's strategic partner or his sock puppet, Johan Bruyneel. Because Team RadioShack was, in my opinion, a disaster this year. Yes, it won the "team GC" classification, traditionally a sort of booby-prize for the team with the most organization and least talent at the Tour. The very notion of building a team around a man of 39 was questionable; the notion of not having a Plan B in case that man crashed out or cracked was even more questionable. Sadly, Levi Leipheimer was exposed as merely a nice guy from Butte, Montana. He never put in a serious attack, never even looked remotely threatening. His thirteenth place was the result of grinding out decent, unspectacular, ultimately mediocre rides every day. That's not enough to become a great champion. He will have to step up his riding if he wants to step onto the podium. And at 37 he doesn't have much time.

The man who turned out to be the real GC hopeful for RadioShack, Chris Horner, was misused for three weeks carrying water for Armstrong or Leipheimer.

The question now is whether Brunyeel can find his next Armstrong or Contador. He has shown that he can't win through pure tactics. If he can't find the next Great his day may well be done.

Mark Cavendish won his fifteen sprint stage in two years.

Holy fuck, the man is fast.

Today is Contador's day in the sun on the Champs. His rival, though, will be back next year, with his brother Frank healthy, and there must be some concern in the Astana party tonight about the possibility of challenges from other of the riders that showed well this year such as Jurgen van den Broek of Lotto and Ryder Hesjedal of Garmin.

Perhaps the single biggest story is the one that has not been told about this year's Tour; the question of doping.

The UCI and the Tour organizers will tell you that the extremely low number of riders ejected for using CERA, ERO, tesosterone, HGH, or any of the many other chemical and blood products that the sport has been saturated with since the Nineties means that the testing is working, and that the dopers are being forced out, or forced to cut back or give up their craft.

And the fact is that the 2010 race was more like last year's relatively scandal-free Tour, and has not featured the horrendous doping scandals of the Tour of 2006, and the lesser but still ugly expulsions of 2007, and 2008 Tours.

But here's the thing that disturbs me.

There's no question that the Tour in the Nineties and Oughts was soaked in doping. The arrival of EPO and the EPO-derivative CERA, HGH, testosterone...these forms of cheating helped men fly up mountains and recover overnight in ways that no clean rider could match.

The patrons of the Eighties, the big men like Lemond, and the domestiques like Frankie Andreiu - who themselves knew of tricks like corticosteroids and caffeine - couldn't believe how the peleton flew along the roads at 45-55 kilometers per hour. EPO changed everything.

In the infamous "Tour de Dopage" in 1998 the winner (Marco Pantani) finished riding 3,877 km (2,409 mi) in about 93 hours.

In 2006, the even more infamous Tour of Floyd Landis, the eventual "winner", Oscar Periero, rode 3,639 km (2,261 mi) in 89 hours 40 minutes.

When Rasmussen of Rabobank was thrown out for dodging a doping test in 2007, while still in yellow, Contador's eventual winning time was 3,569.9 km (2,218 mi) in 91 hours.

You would think that if the testing had been effective in reducing the use of the blood doping, the EPO, the hormones and the drugs, that the winner's time would have begun sliding backwards from the dope-saturated Nineties and EPO-drenched Oughts.

This year's winner's time?

3,642 km (2,263 mi) in 91 hours, 58 minutes, 48 seconds.

Away in the Hollow Ships

On the final rest day of this year's Tour de France, a moment's reflection on the 97th running of perhaps the world's best known bicycle race.

1. This year's Tour seems to be more of a grinding endurance test than ever. The cobblestones didn't help. The weather didn't help. The crashes didn't help. After 16 days of racing there are five riders within eight minutes of each other, but many of the pre-race favorites; Armstrong, Cadel Evans, Ivan Basso, are far down and many minutes out of contention.2. I think we can stop wondering whether if Contador is a one- or two-year wonder, or a great champion in the Hinault and Indurain mold. If he can win this year, and not be brought low by injury or drug use I think he has established himself as a potential successor to the greats of the sport.

That said, I can't help but think less of the man for his attack on the summit of the Port de Balès. If sport is about anything it must be about the measure of the sportsman or sportswoman. The play should be fair; that's why cheating, whether it's doping or foul tackling or buying umpires is so poorly thought of. If sport is to matter anything, it is about testing one person against another to see who can go faster, higher, stronger, further. Regardless of the course of events that day, Contador lost his chance to prove that he would have beaten Schleck fairly. That isn't his job; his job is to win the Tour. But my job as a fan of the sport is to choose who I believe best honors the sport.3. I have talked a lot about this before, and there really is no point in rehashing it. The Armstrong Era of the Tour is over, and in a spectacular fashion; "Your father was no merciful man in the horror of battle.
Therefore your people are grieving for you all through their city,
Hektor, and you left for your parents mourning and sorrow
beyond words, but for me passing all others is left the bitterness
and the pain..."

4. I find that perhaps the saddest part of the Fall of Hektor is that his Patroclus, Levi Leipheimer, inherited a team in disarray. Johann Bruyneel's name has been mentioned when the great organizers and coaches in the sport are mentioned. But this year has to make one wonder; was Bruyneel a great tactician or merely the trained bear for great riders, Armstrong and Contador? He seemed unable, once Armstrong fell, to find a way to get his backup GC contender, Leipheimer, into position to threaten the podium in Paris. Leipheimer seems destined to find a place in the Hall of Near-Fame, a position in the pantheon of the Demi-Gods of Cycling.5. And, again, this year is a tale of woe for Cadel Evans. The Australian rider had suffered from atrocious team support in last year's Tour, finishing 29th, after three years where Silence-Lotto provided barely enough enough help to get him on or near the podium. But the truth is that the man had to do most of the hard work himself. His new BMC Team has done no better for him than Lotto did. But, let's face it, the man cracked on the Col de la Madeleine in Stage 9. He has not ridden like a champion this year. But it's sad to see him fall so far, and land so hard...

As always, the Tour is a pretty good reflection of people in general, with all their hopes, and fears, their greatness and the smallness. It is pain, and fear, bravery, and weakness. It is a great spectacle, and the battle promised for the Tourmalet tomorrow should not be the least of its enticements.

Update 7/21: It is beginning to look very like another Tour victory for the man from Pinto; he paced his rival Andy Schleck all the way up the Col de Tourmalet. I think that Schleck's chance was to drop the Spaniard on the big climb today by a minute or more - he couldn't. And barring disaster I suspect this means a third climb to the top of the podium for Alberto Contador.So as always...Vive' Le Tour!

Missy's Tour de East

Hi! Missy here! I wanted to bring you along on the fun thing we did on Sunday; it's called "Sunday Parkways", and its where lots of people walk, ride bikes, skate, skateboard, unicycle, and do everything but drive on Portland's streets! Mommy got to pull me in my little bike-buggy and my big brother go to go behind Daddy on the trail-a-bike, and we all went on our big adventure with our friends Auntie Meghan and Uncle Will and their friends, too, all over East Portland. So, are you ready?I'm ready to go! Mommy and Daddy left the camera in my buggy, so I took lots and lots of cool pictures of our ride! Here's the view out my buggy window as we set off from our friends Auntie Meghan and Uncle Wills house. Let's go Parkwaying!Here's where we went, which is called East Portland, which my Daddy sometimes calls "Felony Flats" which I totally don't get, but my Daddy laughs at some things which I totally don't get sometimes except Mommy's jokes which he never laughs at hardly ever which makes Mommy totally mad.I call this "My Feet, Which Am Totally NOT Stinky", since my Daddy and Mommy always complain that when I come home from daycare after playing all day and not wearing any socks ever that when I take my shoes off my feet are totally stinky which they are totally NOT!We met these people, and they were totally giving away these totally cool lights, which Mommy put in my buggy, so I got to play with them while Daddy and Mommy and Shea-shea were riding. I also took a picture of the package, which was really colorful and pretty, too.I don't know who this boy is, but I thought this was a good picture so I took it.Did you know how cool it is to be Chinese? Well, everybody in East Portland does now, because our Lee's On Dong Association was in Lents Park with their lion and dragon dancers, traditional fan dancers, drummers, and lots of other really awesome Chinese stuff! And since I'm Chinese, too, I'm also totally great! The lion was a little scary, so Daddy put me on his shoulders, but Mommy and my big brother were really sweet cuddling together to watch. He was a really good lion, and all the people clapped for him!Here's me, the cutest and smartest preschooler in East Portland yesterday. I had my Daddy take this because my arms aren't long enough. He looks like he has an owie but he says it was just because the sun was in his eyes. Silly Daddy!After we left the fun park and said bye-bye to the lions Mommy zipped right along. She is really a good bike rider, almost like a Tour de France guy, but she totally missed the big pink donut truck even though I told her and told her to stop because my tummy totally wanted a yummy donut and I hadn't even had my second treat that day!Since I was the coolest preschooler in the ride, I should have been the fastest. We came up behind this gomer with his silly scooter strapped on his buggy on the way over I-205 and totally blew his door-flaps off. Loser!But there were other slowpokes in front of us and sometimes Mommy had to slow down and even stop for a little bit......and sometimes she even had to get off and walk!In the morning it was cold and gray but Mister Golden Sun came out and we were nice and warm!Here's Mommy's butt-butt, which - unlike my feet - really is kinda stinky and smells like butt but Daddy says it's nice which I don't understand but I saw it a LOT today.We're almost back to Auntie Meghan's, where we will have lots of tasty treats and Uncle Will will fight us with foam swords and make us laugh a really lot and I will sit on Daddy's lap and eat his food and he will pick me up in the air and give me raspberries on my tummy and make me laugh so that I won't feel bad that he misjudged the screen door and gave me an owie, Daddy!And here I am, me, your intrepid reporter. I am the cutests and my feet am not stinky! I love my Mommy, and Daddy, and sometimes my brother, but mostly I love being me!Bye, now!

Training Wheels

I meant to publish these last week: this was from the weekend of 10/4-5, a wet and louring interlude that was only brightened by the Peeper's graduating from training wheels to a regular bike.What helped is that we got Missy a big girl bike at Goodwill that lacked the training wheels; the idea was to take them from the Peep's, but he jumped on her little Barbie bike and began racing about like a maniac.You can see how tiny the thing is: Peeper looked like a circus monkey, peddling six to the dozen to keep moving, but obviously loved the heck out of being free of the little boy constraint.Now we've got the wheels on Missy's bike, and the Peeper is zooming around on his...a happy ending (or beginning, rather) for everyone...

Dating My Wife

The only thing that I didn't plan for was the heat.

Not as hot as asphalt paving Friday - nothing's that hot. And not as hot as the forecasters promised - it was 99, not 103. But that's still pretty damned hot.

But we weren't going to let the heat turn us back. We had the babysitter (Peeper's beloved Nanny Jen) and the B&B and the restaurant all set. So at 10:30 we saddled up on our bikes and rode away with Missy and Peeper hugs still necklaced about us.

It had been...well, honestly, I'm not sure HOW long it'd been since we'd gotten a whole 24 hours to ourselves. Last August, maybe? A long time, anyway. And now we had a whole day and evening and morning to go on a date with each other.

Ahhh...

We rode slowly along the bluff down Willamette Drive, through the pretty Overlook Neighborhood (home to Overlook House, one of the cool things in North Portland and site of our wedding reception back in 2002.)

Below us the freight cars were banging in the Union Pacific yard, an old Peeper fave, but we glided on past and turned down past adidas Portland. Sprout's mommy was home rather than working Saturday, we hoped, although the last time Mojo rode home through adidas she did encounter Sproutmom on the skybridge; we both thought it was nice of Kelli not to hold Mojo's Pumas against her.

Much as we love Sprout's Mommy, though, and think that the minisoccer/futsal and tiny basketball and tennis courts are really nifty, we both agree that the exterior of the adidas buildings is...well, pretty fugly.What do you think?

From the mini-fields behind adidas we clmbed up into the cool little funky neighborhood by Beach Elementary. We sailed on, well south of Extremo the Clown's house, past the nice little park west of Beach School and then up over the Going Street overpass. This NoPo oddity is unique in having TWO adjacent city parks; Sy (or Si?) Stanich Park below the ramp at the south end and "Roy Beach" Park (also identifed as "Converse Park" by a wag with a closet full of odd Chuck Taylors and a nailgun).One thing we didn't notice on the way across were the iconic locks dangling from the chainlink overhead.Were they gone? Had some faceless Portland City plod with the soul of a concrete mixer come and cut them off? Now I feel the need to go back and find out.

We zipped down Bess Kaiser hill and across the Broadway Bridge. Our destination? the "Tour de Fat", a bike-o-rama sponsored by the New Belgium Brewing folks playing that day down at Waterfront Park. After a quick cooling dip in the fun fountain over at Jameson Park (site of Peeper and Missy's Big Bastille Day Adventure, remember?)we pedalled down to the Park to check out the action.Portland is a curious sort of place for cyclists. There's the bulk of us; recreational cyclists (that'd be me), bike commuters like Mojo and our friend Meg, cycle racing types and fairly hardcore riders both competitive and rec league levels. And then there's the "bikisti"; the folks who live to ride, whose life and identity appear to center around their bike. Or, often the other side of the same coin it seems to me, around NOT driving a car. This group includes some hardline ecology types, vegans, natural-fiber-wearers and anti-big-oil conspiritarians. A spattering of all the above were on hand yesterday, and here they are...But the day was hot, and after a bit of quick fun riding the quirky trick bikes we headed for some air-conditioned raw-food goodness sure to soften even the hardest slow/whole foodie's heart:

Sushi Takahashi!! Banzai!!

We loaded up on icy cold water and debated which was better: money, sex or tempura tai, one of Sushi T's signature goodies. We raided the sushi train for the more common delicacies, the everyday nigirizushi, the hamachi, the sake, the tobiko...always waiting for the crispy and flaky goodness of the 'tai; the sting of the house sauce, the buttery meatyness of the hot tilapia within.

Mmmmmm...

One need temporarily sated, we jogged up to Powell's City of Books ostensibly just to windowshop. But, as it happened we both found something we wanted; Mojo a companion to her "Potatoes Not Prozac" volume, me the latest in the Naomi Novik Temeraire series. The only difficulty was finding a place in our already-full pack and panniers. But we shoehorned our books in place and wheeled back down to the Touristas to catch out favorite two-wheeled showgirls, the Sprockettes. The "all female synchronized mini-bike dance troupe" was a powerpack of pink-and-black energy in the heat of the midafternoon, and they put on a fun show.I noted that my bride made a perfect Sprockette in her cute n' stylish pink-and-black biking togs, and like the 'Kettes, their biggest fangirl took to Salmon Street Springs right after the show to cool off:Safety Tip: SSS is NOT an actual spring! It's a water fountain! That recycles its water! So that 40-ouncer, that preschooler's urine? Right back atcha! (with a little filtration, of course...) So - don't drink the water! But ahhhh! Much cooler, thanks.It was getting late and time to head up Terwilliger Boulevard to our home for the night. Terwilliger is an artifact of the sort of turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century city planning that produced places like New York's Central Park...and by the same guy Here's the skinny from a 2004 Portland State publication:

"Olmsted outlined a pervasive structure of parks and parkways that began by proposing a large forest reservation between Riverview Cemetery and the southern suburb of Lake Oswego (partially achieved today with Tryon Creek State Park). An informal "picturesque" parkway would run from Riverview Cemetery along the eastern foot of the West Hills, connecting the downtown park squares, Washington Park, and passing by Macleay Park up to what is now Forest Park. Terwilliger Boulevard today is part of this proposed city-length parkway, as are Skyline Boulevard above and Lief Erikson Drive through Forest Park. East of the river, he proposed a river bluff parkway from Sellwood to the current site of OMSI, McLoughlin Boulevard being a remnant of Olmsted's planned road. In the middle of the river, he proposed Ross Island as a park. Another parkway (Willamette Boulevard) would run north approximately from N.E. Broadway along the river bluff above the rail yards and Mock's Bottom to the University of Portland. A great meadow park in the Columbia Slough, just west of where Portland International Airport now sits, would preserve the bottom land scenery near the river. A vast expanse of this area is now preserved in greenspaces, wetlands, forests, and parks. Olmsted then proposed running a series of boulevards from Sellwood Park to Ladd's Addition, out to Mt. Tabor Park and then north, up to Columbia Slough Park and back over to the proposed parkway on the bluff above Swan Island. Like Boston's Emerald Necklace, designed by his stepfather Frederick, John's proposed park system—elongated and connected—would provide nearly a greenbelt across and around the city.

Pretty cool neh?

It's a lot more wooded than it was in the 1920's, and we took the gentle hill slowly to beat the heat, enjoying the quiet trail and the break from the oppressive sun.

Along the way we passed the handful of expensive houses that Portland's rich had managed to get built along the road; not many - the steep hills, heavy rain and frequent landsides that the combination create have prevented this part of Portland from becoming another Forest Heights, where the tiered stacks of grand houses are suggestive of nothing so much as a fancy wedding cake. Emblematic, my old field assistant Barry used to sneer, of the crumbs inside.

The icing on our cake was just up the hill from Terwilliger on SW Westwood: "Britannia at Terwilliger Vista".

As advertised, this pretty, large "elegant Georgian Colonial located in the residential Terwilliger Heights area sumptuous rooms offer luxurious accommodations..."

And the accomodations were, indeed, large, airy, and best of all...cool!

We enjoyed a long cold bath in the wonderful big tub. And then an even more enjoyable laze with nary a little voice to roust us or little body to scale us. We were able, for the first time in a long time, to just enjoy each other's company. To kiss and cuddle, to have an entire long lazy afternoon just to ourselves.

Those of you with kids understand the topgallant delight implicit in that simple phrase. Those who don't...trust me. It's really, really good.
Not much more to tell. An unhurried evening with dinner at Portland's Chart House watching the moonrise over our city. A hand-in-hand walk back to the breezy room and the quiet house.

A late morning with no more to do than eat breakfast and slowly ride home. To a happy baby girl showing off her brand new "glash!" (glasses)and a little - big - boy who wants to be a bikista like dad and mom and "the Tour de France guys".Well.

I hope you and yours had a good weekend, too.